"data store" entries

Resolving transactional access and analytic performance trade-offs

The O’Reilly Data Show podcast: Todd Lipcon on hybrid and specialized tools in distributed systems.

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350px-Dolderbrug_Steenwijk_inclusief_lichtontwerpIn recent months, I’ve been hearing about hybrid systems designed to handle different data management needs. At Strata + Hadoop World NYC last week, Cloudera’s Todd Lipcon unveiled an open source storage layer — Kudu —  that’s good at both table scans (analytics) and random access (updates and inserts).

While specialized systems will continue to serve companies, there will be situations where the complexity of maintaining multiple systems — to eke out extra performance — will be harder to justify.

During the latest episode of the O’Reilly Data Show Podcast, I sat down with Lipcon to discuss his new project a few weeks before it was released. Here are a few snippets from our conversation:

HDFS and Hbase

[Hadoop is] more like a file store. It allows you to upload files onto an arbitrarily sized cluster with 20-plus petabytes, in single clusters. The thing is, you can upload the files but you can’t edit them in place. To make any change, you have to basically put in a new file. What HBase does in distinction is that it has more of a tabular data model, where you can update and insert individual row-by- row data, and then randomly access that data [in] milliseconds. The distinction here is that HDFS is pretty good for large scans where you’re putting in a large data set, maybe doing a full parse over the data set to train a machine learning model or compute an aggregate. If any of that data changes on a frequent basis or if you want to stream the data in or randomly access individual customer records, you’re kind of out of luck on HDFS. Read more…